Okay, so it's not Koala, and it's not 2000; but that's kinda what I'm thinking at the moment: that Koala grew up sometime in the last twenty-five years.

In case that makes little sense [if, for example, you happen to be under twenty-five as you read this], there was, once upon a decade, a marvel of engineering which...I suppose it really just kindasorta revolutionised the lightpens no one liked much in the seventies. But it was progress. Damnit.

What happened, see, was that someone thought it might be a good idea to develop this sort of manipulative device, which would allow the user to use a Commodore64 to make, erm...art. Or something. And the proper way to do that was to have a piece of hardware called a KoalaPad.

So. There we were. The year was 1982. Or so. Probably. I dunno. It seems like we were still waiting to confirm whether Luke was related to Vader. It was a while ago, at the least. And, those of us who'd moved up the technological foodchain from the Apple][ and got a C64 now had the option of using something other than the keyboard to make the computer do neat stuff. In actuality, you could jam a basic Atari joystick into a C64 and move the mousepointer around in GEOS [occasionally known as Windoze0.1]; but the Koala was utterly cool.

One factor was that it came with software. And that's saying something for the C64, which was actually a sort of typewriter into which you could try to copypaste [read: go through printed lines of code on paper, banging them into the machine and hoping to get it right without having to bugfix any typos] bits of BASIC and maybe get neat things to happen. Most of which looked something like this:

10 LET X=1
20 PRINT X
30 X=X+1
40 GOTO20

...which of course led to this:

1
2
3
4
5
...
OVERFLOW ERROR AT 46656

The Koala came with precompiled software. It came with Photoshop.

Okay. It came with MSPaint. Junior. Twice Removed. It came with a tiny workspace, sixteen colours [including black and white], a pencil tool, a straight line tool, a circularish tool, and possibly text. But we were lucky to have it, and we thanked Zeus for keeping us out of Hades.

It sucked. It really, really did. But, it was marginally better than the freepaint mode in Surround on the AtariVCS. So it was something.

That was then. After which, time passed and science marched on.

Little of this is likely to be news to much of anyone. But, I kinda had to hit a wordcount to ensure that I was past the rightaligned image up there before thumping in the next one, belowish.

In a way though it was news to me. Kinda. The part about science having marched on. Though I'd had this hunch about that. Because, see, in the mumblemutter years since the Koala was replaced and spanked utterly by All Things Wacom, I never really bothered with them. At all. Like, I never so much as touched one. Even though I touch pencils, and notice daily that even my uberwicked trackball fails to touch pencils.

I did happen to touch a...some genericish thing. JamStudios somethingorother. To my thinking, it sucked more than the Koala ever did. Hunter of course digs it. That's fine. She can have it. I have better things to do than search out heavy things to attach to the thing's pen to get it to gouge deeply enough into the surface to convince the computer that it's actually happening. Heavy things like my car.

So, last night, wandering aimlessly through CompUSA noticing that they really don't make my trackball anymore [a bit of a crime, since it works really well apart from the issue where it's five years old and no longer works really well], I happened across the Wacom section. And, granting that these things cost a lot, and that they cost even more to get one large enough to consider trying to use, and that the JamStudio toy really, really sucks...I bought one anyway. What the hell. It's a writeoff. I think. If not, my cigarettes are a writeoff: I'm in a hundredyear longitudinal study to ascertain whether smoking will kill me. It's an expense.

The Wacom is nearly better than cigarettes. I dig it. A lot.

I'm a bit perplexed by it. It seems to work in part through PFM. The pen's totally wireless and batteriless, but it understands various things. Like, if you turn it around to use the eraser, it actually erases. I kinda suspect magnets or something; I'm also allowing that it might be the Power of Odin. It's just odd.

I'm still kinda getting used to it. That I don't have to dig through the tablet toward Guam to get a computer to acknowledge that I'm using it is a hell of a start; but I haven't fully mastered sketching out light lines with enough control to replace a mechanical pencil yet. That, once I get it worked out, I'll replace the need for a damned scanner is what's keeping me going. After that, I expect good things. Or, at least, weird things. Which is what usually happens with a pencil around me.

I guess I'll go back to trying to get enough control to use this thing for more than showing off my PhD in scribbling.

UPDATE: Still working on it:

More later....

Forgot to add tags for this stupid entry.